Writing and imagining ritual in the Babylonian New Year festival texts

In cuneiform culture the New Year Festival was an important ritual of kingship. The most fundamental source for the reconstruction of this festival is a small corpus of cuneiform ritual texts that describe the ritual actions and prayers to be performed during the first days of the year. Those texts...

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主要作者: Debourse, Céline (Author)
格式: 電子 Article
語言:English
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出版: Wiley-Blackwell 2024
In: Religion compass
Year: 2024, 卷: 18, 發布: 2
在線閱讀: Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig)
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總結:In cuneiform culture the New Year Festival was an important ritual of kingship. The most fundamental source for the reconstruction of this festival is a small corpus of cuneiform ritual texts that describe the ritual actions and prayers to be performed during the first days of the year. Those texts were written by Babylonian priests during the Persian-Hellenistic period (484–140 BCE), when Babylonia had come under foreign rule. Why were these ritual texts outlining a royal ritual created at a time when Babylonia was governed by foreign rulers, who had little interest in Babylonian religious traditions? Why write down rituals at all? In this paper, I show how these New Year Festival texts are programmatic more than instructional, as they give shape to a new ritual paradigm in which Babylonian priests, not kings, are the central authority of the cult.
ISSN:1749-8171
Contains:Enthalten in: Religion compass
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/rec3.12489